My request that I sent out to supporters of the Franco-American Women's Institute:
Hello, I hope everything is well with you. I am writing an article on Franco-American women and the influence their French heritage effects their lives. I am hoping to include quotes from women in regard to the existence of the Franco-American Women's Institute website for fifteen! years...and how do you see that element in helping to promote Franco-American women's lives/words.
Could you send me your thoughts about the existence of the FAWI website and what you believe is an important aspect of having such a website promoting the voices of Franco-American women. Please focus on the FAWI website...your participation via published works, use of the website, etc.
I would like to include the quotes in my article for the September issue--I have a 7-27 deadline for the rough draft...so if you could write me a brief response, I would be much obliged. Merci, Rhea
Rhea Cote Robbins, Founder/Director
P.S. Please forward this to anyone you think would like to make a comment.
Thank you all who responded and continues to be a vital support of this work! Without all of you, FAWI would not be so rich and diverse. Rhea
The Replies:
Dear Rhea,
I can't give you enough superlatives for the value that the institute and the website have. We are such a retiring people as a group, heh? This place you've created in the physical and virtual worlds gives me a sense of psychological place as French-French Canadian-Franco-American-Acadian. It witnesses and validates our contributions. Your links are invaluable to the historical novels I am working on; they link me to original French and English translations with a few hops through Google. But I would not so easily know about them were it not for your highlights and directions.
I am still missing your blog!
Cheers,
Ann Forcier
Bonsoir Rhea,
Maybe you'll harvest a useful line for your article. Here are my reflections Thank you for writing the article and thank you for FAWI!
My can of worms opened up towards the end of the 90's when I had to take a fundamental writing class for a degree program. When revealing my essay topic, I found out that my native New England classmates didn't know what a Franco-American was. Two-thirds of their names were French. What the heck had happened?
I concluded that others, and I, had put our memories and culture in mothballs to protect them until there was a place to safely air them. And behold, there was FAWI at the top of my Internet search. And there were memories like mine! Some written in French, some in English, some in both. Both!
Some memories I can only recall in French. Life events embedded in my bones can't be revisited in any other language. I haven't the skill. Expressing these thoughts in any other language would produce neither nod nor smile in a reader who isn't basally wired for Franco-American humor. Even if I were ambitious enough to try to fully Americanize mes mémoires, to reveal them to those who still couldn't appreciate them through no fault of their own, then desecration would somehow be involved.
FAWI gives me permission to be what I have to be and say what I have to say. It coaxes me to tell my stories and entices me to listen to those of others. It validates all of me: la-bonne-chanson me, and live-free-or-die me. It taught me that rather than being a bicultural aberration, I'm really floating in a hearty, jumbo sized Franco-American stew.
Before FAWI, who knew? Our voices had been silent for so long.-- Ann Marie "Staples”
Dear Rhea, I can't give you enough superlatives for the value that the institute and the website have. We are such a retiring people as a group, heh? This place you've created in the physical and virtual worlds gives me a sense of psychological place as French-French Canadian-Franco-American-Acadian. It witnesses and validates our contributions. Your links are invaluable to the historical novels I am working on; they link me to original French and English translations with a few hops through Google. But I would not so easily know about them were it not for your highlights and directions. I am still missing your [news] blog! Cheers, Ann Sunka
FAWI was instrumental to me really appreciating where I come from. So much so I made the trip of my lifetime to France at the end of March this year. It would never had happened had FAWI not whetted my appetite for my French self.
Barbara A. Ouellette
Without the online existence of FAWI, I would have felt much more alone in my search for roots. Reading all the site's posts connected me to years of memories that I claimed as a heritage that didn't exist for me beyond my immediate family.-- Cecile Poulin
Rhea Cote Robbins' efforts over the past fifteen years to cultivate a lively forum for Franco-American women greatly encouraged us to share our reflections and freely discuss our common heritage.
Her FAWI website community motivated me to conduct twenty years of genealogical and bilingual historical research to write a four-book Quebecois Series depicting our common ancestral experience in Acadia and Nouvelle France from the mid-1600s through 1763. Thank you, Rhea!—Doris Provencher Faucher
Although I am only one quarter Franco-American, this part of my family heritage is central to my life today. My father spoke French and English as a boy, raised by my French-Canadian grandmother in upstate New York to speak French at home and with cousins on yearly trips to Quebec. I grew up in a suburban town in Westchester, New York. We did not speak French at home because my Irish-American mother did not speak it, but my father taught me phrases and numbers and vocabulary from a young age. We visited relatives in Montreal -- my grandmother's cousins -- several times. My grandmother had immigrated with her family as a teenager around 1920. The family all eventually returned to Quebec, but my grandmother remained in the US to marry my grandfather, an Anglo-American named William Blood.
I studied French in high school and college, but honestly, I saw French as a door to a greater outside world of adventure and travel in Europe, not as a reclaiming of my heritage. I studied abroad in France in college and later decided to pursue graduate studies in French. I have a master's and a PhD, with a specialization in 18th century French theater. It wasn't until later that I realized that French was more than a way to escape a somewhat boring suburban childhood.
My father always maintained strong relationships with our French-speaking cousins in Quebec and, when I decided to pursue graduate studies in French, took me on a trip to see the old family farm where he spent summers as a kid and to meet relatives in Montreal, with whom I could now communicate in their native language. At that time, I knew very little about Quebec but started to think maybe I should learn more.
After completing my PhD, as I began my career as a French professor, I signed up for a two-week seminar in Quebec designed to teach French professors about the history, culture and literature of Quebec. This piqued my interest and the teaching of Quebec has now become one of my primary interests, along with my new interest in Franco-American Studies. I finally realized, about the time I started my current tenured position at Salem State University, that French was not only a door to a greater outside world, but also a door to my inner self, my family's history and heritage as immigrants from Quebec. It was not something that divided me from my past, but rather an integral part of it. Having landed in Salem, Massachusetts, a city with a strong Franco-American heritage, I began to explore the local Franco community (I am now Vice-President of our local Richelieu Club) and to read literature in this field. I now combine my voyage of self-discovery with my scholarly interests in
Interests, Quebec and Franco-America. Since my father's death in 2008, I realize that French was my connection to him and his connection to his mother and our relatives in Quebec. It may only be one quarter of my genetic make-up, but I now embrace my Franco-American heritage...oui, je suis franco-americaine!
-- Elizabeth Ann Blood, Ph. D., Salem State University
The most important thing that FAWI has done for me has been to connect me with my heritage, a heritage that my Franco-American mother had tried to reject, had tried to hide, in order to be part of the mainstream even though she never lost her French accent. It saddened me that she always felt not good enough. She of the many talents, stories, and more: This saddened me, and when I found the on-line class that Rhea Cote taught through the University of Maine, I joined up.
Without FAWI, I would never have gotten involved in finding out as much as I could about this important part of my heritage. Oh, I had already gone to the area, found a lot of people like Geraldine Chasse, and heard a lot of stories; I had seen where my mother lived, some places still there; others not. And I met some distant relatives who remembered my mother well. But I never really “knew” my heritage until Rhea’s on-line class; The Institute makes that knowledge and more continually available to me every day through articles about the Franco-American heritage that we can write and share..
--Joyce Laverty Miller, daughter of Marie Lucie Gravelle, 1917 - 2002
Why FAWI? Why is it so important to have a website promoting Franco‐American women’s voices?
Voyons . . . FAWI reveals the rich tapestry of the Franco‐American women’s experience. How to describe it? Welcoming, informative, provocative, inspiring, it never fails to offer new insights, to provide new ways of connecting with Franco‐American women’s lives and creativity. FAWI provides a forum where these amazing women, knowing that they have found a receptive audience, can speak from both head and heart.
And that is not all. FAWI is a useful research tool. I recommend it frequently to friends, students, and teachers. This July The American Association of Teachers of French invited me to present my session The FrancoAmericans: Local Resources/Global Ties at the annual convention in Montréal. When attendees asked if I could suggest websites with information on Franco‐Americans, they were pleased to hear that the URL for FAWI, highly recommended, appeared in the bibliography.
What does FAWI mean to me personally? Voyons encore. . . . Clicking on several of the FAWI links today I discovered a review of One Came Back, the first English version of Rémi Tremblay’s Un revenant which I translated and annotated in collaboration with Claire Quintal. “How amazing that we also collaborated on The Innocent Victim, the first annotated English translation of Adélard Lambert’s L’Innocente Victime.”
At present, thankfully, I have no big writing projects in the works. What about a smaller one? Two more clicks. The Tourtière Connection and moé pi toé immediately provided two pieces which seemed to invite me to join an on‐going conversation. Tourtière. Memere/maman's recipe for tourtiere has nutmeg.
My husband’s family (the Daneault family) recipe calls for cinnamon and cloves. But how a tourtière is made is not nearly as important as what it evokes. Just a bite of a Danneault tourtière brings back Christmas memories of family get‐togethers, swapping pork pie samples, gossip, family stories, and tall tales—what a vignette that would make.
Another click, another inspiration. In Moé pi toé, Mo Perry’s poems Au café and Créons et croyons beckon me also. Can one poem converse with others? If so, my poem, The Daily Mirror,
[see poem this issue at "Poetry"] would like to join in. Why FAWI? Why is it so important to have a website promoting Franco‐American women’s voices?
Above, I have noted just a few of the many reasons that FAWI is important to me.
Margaret S. Langford
French and Franco‐American Studies
Keene State College
In 1970, Margaret married into the Danneault‐Leblanc family of Suncook, New Hampshire. So doing, she found both her personnel and professional life profoundly enriched and transformed.
The Franco-American Women’s Institute is a great outlet for me because I feel that my voice is welcomed and that I actually have a voice when I publish my work. I can be creative without worrying about grammar and punctuation. English is my second language, although I have spoken it since I was a kid... I mentioned to Rhea that I have not been writing in years because I am not sure in what language I should write... I have lost the fluidity I used to have when I wrote in French, and I am often hard press to find the right words or expressions in English. Some French expressions just don’t translate well. And of course... we all know that Franco-Americans in general have been self-conscious about their French, never feeling that they spoke the proper French (whatever that is.) When the directors of a French school in Maine told me that I was building museums by teaching my students that there is more than one way to say a word like “chaussure”... (because we, Franco-Americans, say “soulier”)...and that I should stick with the “proper” way (comme ils parlent en France bien sûr).. I was reminded where some of that discrimination came from.... our own distant cousins. FAWI was a place for me to express the strong emotions that surface when we are put in a position of inferiority. Of course, I refused to accept that this mentality should be validated. And there they were again at the Franco-American Day at the State House a few months ago, telling an elderly French-Acadian historian that she should not say “frette”... that the proper word is “froid”. A few biblical expressions come to mind (yes...we have swears of our own too!) This attitude is WRONG and I am so glad there is a place for me to talk about this, to share my thoughts and of course, to read what others have created... such beautiful and inspiring work. And Rhea said to me: “Don’t worry about what language to write in... write in both! I thought wow, that’s brilliant..why haven’t I thought of that. When I can’t think of how to say something in English, I say it in French.. and vice versa. Who cares! This is what’s so cool about FAWI. It has given me the freedom to write anything I want to and however I want...no grades involved here, just beautiful women who want to share their creativity and their stories. Merci Rhea.
--Louise Tanguay-Ricker
Martha Sterling-Golden
Congratulations on 15 years of FAWI!
"As a board member of the Old Canada Road Historical Society in Bingham, I believe FAWI is an essential part of the preservation of Franco-American women's history, and the cultivation of new voices in the FAW experience. Many thanks to Rhea Cote Robbins for her vision and passion, and 15 years of dedicated work."
I really admire what you've accomplished.
Best,
Martha Sterling-Golden
Past President of the Women's Campaign School at Yale University
Bravo, Rhea!
FAWI helps keep the culture alive both by honoring the past and by encouraging future work. It has supported my writing for years and continues to do so.
--Amicalement,
Mo
Maureen Perry, Poet
The Franco-American Women's Institute website stands as beacon of justice and morality. FAWI director, Rhea Cote Robbins, seeks out and publishes edgy writing on topics important to women that likely would not be aired.
For instance, one paper found that Catholic church doctrine hurts women and declared that women can be pro-choice and Catholic. FAWI’s publishing my “Reclaiming Eve: A Pro-Choice Ethic for Catholic Women” vastly broadened its reach beyond its academic grounding to offer hope, acceptance and choice to Catholic women faced with unintended pregnancy.
Thank you Rhea; long live FAWI.
Melissa MacCrae, M.A. , Owner, Spin A Yarn, Brewer, ME
I first began corresponding with Rhea Cote Robbins when she was the editor of The Forum, the bilingual newspaper published at the University of Maine in Orono. I continued the correspondence when Ms. Cote Robbins founded the Franco-American Women’s Institute (FAWI) in 1996. Because of the research I do on Franco-Americans, I find the FAWI website particularly useful for its up-to-date and very extensive bibliography of sources that I can drew upon. The website has literally hundreds of links to help anyone doing research on Franco-Americans. And, if perchance, the topic a person is researching is not addressed specifically on the website, a quick e-mail to Ms. Cote Robbins will always elicit a helpful response. I am currently doing research on St. Andre’s Home, a home for unwed mothers in Biddeford, Maine founded by Franco-American priests and staffed by Franco American nuns, whose patients, especially in its early years, were primarily Franco-American. Ms. Cote Robbins has provided me with information and advice on my research and her website has provided useful background information in researching my topic. --Michael Guignard, Ph.D.
F.A.W.I.’s Wingspan
It was with pleasure that, a few years ago, thanks to Le Forum (which was then called F.A.R.O.G Forum), I discovered the F.A.W.I. Website that I revisit now and then just to be reminded of the concerns of other Franco-American Women, whether they are writers or are simply exchanging ideas or recipes and telling about inspiring books they read. On the advice of Lisa Michaud, editor at Le Forum, I sent F.A.W.I. a short story, “Rue des voleurs” or “Street of Thieves.” The title is in French, takes place in France, but the story is in English. It was accepted and published in F.A.W.I. .
As most of my stories, “Rue des voleurs” is based on facts, transposed and arranged in such a fashion that they form a story.
In my mind, my heart and my writings, I constantly shuttle between the French and the American shores. It so happened that, 2 or 3 years ago, F.A.W..I. formed a bridge joining the two shores.
Writing “Rue des voleurs” in the United-States, I didn’t bother changing the protagonists’ names in the story, except for mine as Janine. She is my alter ego. Who, in France, would ever read this? Right? So I kept my aunt’s and uncle’s names, as well as that of their son, my cousin, Gérard, who was two-years-old at the time. All three have left us several years ago, and I seldom correspond with Gerard’s children, now married, with children of their own.
Did they Google my name? One day, I received an e-mail message from Gerard’s son, telling me that he and his sister had read “Rue de voleurs” on Internet, on F.A.W.I., and that they were moved to read about their grandparents, whom one barely knew and the other not at all.
As you can see, F.A.W.I. spans both shores.
Michelle Barany
Ye, Rhea, you may use the whole thing. Michelle Barany
"Thank you, Rhea. Yes, you may mention that I was born in Paris, but grew up in La Rochelle, my dad's birthplace."
The FAWI website is fabulous in that I can keep up with what is happening in Franco culture today.
Thanks,
Pam Gemme
...but I just wanted to send you my brief thoughts on the FAWI collection.
I took one class with you (or maybe it was two.....my memory is so short!....actually, if it happened 100 years ago, I am more likely to remember it than if it happened 10 years ago!).
Anyway, my thoughts about the FAWI include the following:
I was born in and grew up in Maine, but happened to live in a town that did not have a particularly visible Franco-American population. The FAWI really opened my eyes to the diversity in Maine and gave me a first-hand view into the lives of Franco-American women. There were some similarities with my own Maine cultural heritage - but many differences: food/recipies, certainly language (French) and idiomatic expressions, religious practice and expression, and music - to name a few. The FAWI and the course work I did with you, Rhea, really expanded my understanding and knowledge of my home place. I can't thank you enough. We are Maine sisters in that we grew up here at the same time.....but we are cousins in that our cultural experiences were different in many ways.
Looking forward to reading the piece in the PST!!
PvH
Phyllis Vonherrlich
